


The Scars We Bear

by Wonko



Category: Holby City
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, Countdown: touch, F/F, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Internalized Homophobia, M rating is for themes not sex, Scars, sorry to disappoint lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:22:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22310230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wonko/pseuds/Wonko
Summary: Most people dream and fantasise about their soulmates. Serena wishes she could opt out of the whole ridiculous concept. Her body is hers, her life is hers. She's definitely not interested in finding her soulmate.Fate has other plans.A soulmate AU where every scar your soulmate receives creates a ghostly echo on your skin. Written for the prompt 'touch' for the Berena Final Countdown event.
Relationships: Serena Campbell/Bernie Wolfe
Comments: 11
Kudos: 88
Collections: The Final Countdown





	The Scars We Bear

**Author's Note:**

> When fortytworedvines asked for an idea for today's prompt I suggested an off the cuff soulmate AU, which made me remember I had also had this idea for a soulmate AU. So here it is.
> 
> Please note the tags above and take care of yourself if self harm is trigger for you.

The first time it happens she’s three years old. Her mother notices during her nightly bath, and in the future it’s one of the earliest memories she retains of her childhood - that little gasp of surprise and wonder, followed by a close examination of her right knee.

“What, mummy?” Serena asks, already eager to get back to playing with her duckie.

Adrienne inspects her knee for a moment longer, then smiles. “It’s your first mark,” she explains, though Serena doesn’t understand yet. “Not everyone gets them. You’re lucky.”

It keeps happening throughout her childhood - little marks, the echoes of cuts and grazes, the evidence of a rough and tumble sort of life. By the time she’s seven she understands what the marks mean - her soulmate, whoever he is, is an extremely irritating and careless person. Adrienne is indulgent when Serena expresses annoyance at yet another silvery mark, tells her she’s lucky that she’ll one day marry such an adventurous boy. “Boys will be boys,” she reminds her after another echo of a scar appears, this time on her right thumb.

“Well, I wish they wouldn’t,” she retorts, and Adrienne just laughs.

She doesn’t give much thought to the boy causing her all this annoyance. She has friends with their own marks who seem to think of nothing but what their boy is like. They talk about their soulmates constantly, make up stories about how he made their scars, draw pictures of what they imagine he’s like. Serena simply can’t picture him. When she tries, she’s met with a void. Just a vague impression of someone she’s not all that sure she likes - a boy like the ones at her school who mock her for being the teacher’s pet, who spend their lives climbing trees and playing football and laughing when Serena shyly admits one day in class at age ten that she dreams of being a doctor.

“Don’t you want to find him?” her friend Miranda asks her just before she turns sixteen. “Don’t you think it’s so _romantic_?”

Serena looks up from her textbooks to frown at the figure of Miranda lying on her bed, twirling her hair between her fingers. “No,” she replies tersely. “I want to study for my exams. So should you.”

Miranda pulls a face. “I don’t need exams,” she says. “I’m going to find my soulmate and marry him and have babies and be _happy,_ like my mum did.”

Serena scoffs. “There are billions of men in the world - you don’t think you need a backup plan? Just in case you can’t inspect every single one for matching scars while you’re still of child bearing age.”

Miranda just smiles in response. Later, when Serena finds out what she’s done, she has to resist the urge to vomit. “I’m going to advertise in the papers,” Miranda explains, holding out her arm to show Serena the symbol she’s carved into her own flesh. “He’s bound to notice _this_.”

Over the years, what Miranda did becomes more and more popular. At university, first in Durham, then in Massachusetts, she meets more and more people with self-made scars. The idea horrifies and sickens her, and she lives in fear of one day waking up to discover an echo of something similar on her own skin. But she never does. Grudgingly, she accepts that whoever he is wouldn’t be much of a soulmate to her if he was _that_ stupid.

“You really don’t like your marks, do you?” Edward says one day, his fingers trailing over her naked skin, his eyes watchful as she flinches away from his touch on those silvery echoes.

“You wouldn’t understand,” she replies shortly. Edward doesn’t have any marks. Not like hers anyway. All of his scars are of his own making. He’ll never understand the resentment she feels every time one appears, the way they make her feel like her body is not fully her own, the way they seem to scream at her that her life has been mapped out without her consent. She rails against it for most of her twenties, vacillating between anger and a soul-deep sadness that eventually earns her a diagnosis of depression. She sees a therapist, takes the drugs, gradually comes out the other side. Edward notices the marks on her inner thighs - red and angry rather than silver, after the night she drank three bottles of wine and went to work with a razorblade to prove that her body was _hers_ , that she could make her own mark on it. He notices, but says nothing, and neither does she. There’s no way he would understand anyway.

Marrying him is a mistake, and not only because his scars don’t match hers. He’s lecherous, boorish, doesn’t even pretend to be faithful. But she stubbornly sticks at it, because this was her choice and by god she’s going to see it through.

And then it happens.

Another scar appears, low on her abdomen this time. She sees it in the mirror as she strips off after a long shift and there’s no denying what it is. A c-section scar.

Her mind reels and she has to sit down before she faints. A c-section scar. 

A woman. 

The soulmate she’s been wondering about and chafing against and resenting her whole life isn’t a man. It’s a woman. _She’s_ a woman.

But Serena is not a lesbian. Absolutely not. She likes men. She understands them. She likes talking to them, being with them, she likes _fucking_ them. This doesn’t make sense.

An irrational burst of rage flares up. Why can’t her damn soulmate leave her alone? When will this stop? Why can’t she opt out of the whole ridiculous concept?

Edward sees the new mark and immediately understands what it means. His smirk makes her stomach churn, but she shoves him onto his back and straddles him anyway. She’ll show him. She’ll show her alleged soulmate, whoever she is. Serena is not a lesbian. Categorically not.

Nine months later she has a baby of her own - vaginal birth for her, no matching scar for the stranger - and she stays with Edward for another six years, valiantly fighting against everything telling her she’s in the wrong life. He tries using _that_ scar as a defence in the divorce, but the evidence of his infidelity is so overwhelming - documented! Witnessed by half the bloody hospital, much to her humiliation - that it cuts no ice. 

Edward leaves a different kind of scar than her soulmate.

She retreats into her work, hires a nanny, spends long hours at the hospital and on training courses. She makes a point of being home for Elinor’s bath time at least once a week and is relieved when no marks ever appear on her daughter’s beautiful skin. She, at least, will be free.

And yet…

Alone, naked in the dark, she finds her fingers ghosting over the familiar scars. They’re perfectly smooth, indistinguishable from normal skin by touch alone, but in her mind they burn. And she finds herself thinking a traitorous thought.

_What’s she like?_

Maddeningly, the thought takes root. Years pass and she can’t stop herself from sneaking glances at the women she meets. Could it be her? Would she want it to be? No, she thinks stubbornly. Of course not. But a small voice in her head whispers _what if…_

When the internet gets popular, websites spring up promising they’ll find your soulmate (for a small fee, of course.) There are registries of scars you can join that will email you matches daily. Some people - people like Miranda, the same kind who’ve always done this - carve their own unique scars to make the process faster. The news has semi-regular ‘And finally’ human interest stories about people who found some distant soulmate online. Puff pieces are written about the power of the internet, and how wonderful it is that technology has been able to unite soulmates who, in decades past, would have been kept apart forever.

She thinks about finding her. She gets as far as typing half her credit card number into one of the matching service sign up forms before coming to her senses.

She carries on. New marks appear, on occasion. She tries not to think about them, to wonder how her soulmate came by them. She doesn’t entirely succeed. 

Robbie notices it before she does. She already knows she has to break up with him, knows he’s another mistake, but the appearance of the new scar hastens the end. “Wow,” he says as she shrugs out of her blouse one evening. “Well, I knew it wasn’t _me_ but that’s a message if ever I saw one.”

She frowns, turns to the full length mirror and gasps. The new scar stretches all the way down her abdomen, and her medical training immediately tells her this was major abdominal surgery. Her heart clutches in her chest and _oh_ , of course it would take something like this to make her realise how badly she wants to find her soulmate, how she’s been longing to find her for years and years. Because what does this new scar mean? Is she sick? Injured? Has she even survived the surgery? 

Has she missed her chance?

It really isn’t fair, she thinks. She’s spent her life hating and resenting these marks, hating everything they represent, and now she finds herself aching. Bubbling over with impotent love.

After Robbie goes, she spends the night drinking Shiraz and cataloguing every one of her scars. She gets a notebook and starts to write down a description of each one and when they appeared. To her surprise, she can remember every single one. 

She meets Bernie Wolfe a month later.

Serena tries to be friends with her but she’s distant. She keeps herself apart from everyone, so the grapevine says, but Serena keeps trying and is gently rebuffed again and again. It smarts a little. Bernie is interesting, and it’s not like she doesn’t need an ally in the hospital.

She also has a scar on her neck that looks suspiciously like the one Serena is covering with makeup.

It’s that knowledge that makes her react so harshly to finding out that Bernie - like Edward - is a cheat. It feels personal, and her first instinct is to lash out, to retract her offer of friendship. Bernie looks like a kicked puppy but she accepts it like it’s her due. Serena spends that night tracing the scar on her neck with trembling fingers, her heart bursting with longing.

Bernie has a scar just like Serena’s on her thumb. She sees it during their arm wrestle and feels her stomach clench. Another scar on her forearm reveals itself when they’re scrubbing in to surgery one day. A casual conversation tells her that Charlotte was born by c-section, about nine months before Elinor.

She knows. _She knows, she knows, she knows._

When Bernie kisses her after Fletch’s surgery, it’s nothing more than confirmation. No kiss has ever felt like this. She’s almost irritated to finally understand that what the romantics say is true - it really is better when it’s _the one_. 

Still, it takes a little while to process it: time which Bernie takes to mean regret. “You want to forget it ever happened,” she says, taking a sip of Shiraz to bolster her courage.

“I...I think it’s wise?” Bernie hedges, but whatever she’s about to say next dies in her throat as Serena reaches out to take her hand.

She traces her fingers over the scar on Bernie’s thumb. “October 3rd 1972,” she murmurs, then moves to the one on her forearm. “July 17th 1985.” She reaches for the now faded mark on her neck, where Guy Self had made his incision. “February 2nd 2016,” she says gently.

Bernie is trembling. “S-...Serena…” she stutters, and Serena smiles.

“Yes, darling,” she says. “It’s me.”

She takes Bernie home with her, cooks her dinner, drinks her in. Then she takes her to bed, unwraps her like a gift, drags tremulous fingers over marks she knows like her own skin. Over marks that are _a part_ of her own skin. Nothing has prepared her for the reality of this touch. It’s overwhelming, and when Bernie gently parts her thighs and kisses the long faded marks she inflicted on herself all those years ago, she can’t help but let out a sob. Bernie is with her in an instant, kissing her, running her fingers through her hair, whispering assurances and love. It’s everything everyone ever told her it would be. Everything she never allowed herself to want.

“Did you ever try to find me?” she whispers later as they lie together in the dark, their skin sticky and muscles sated. She’s trailing her fingers through the messy waves of Bernie’s hair, her whole body alive with an awareness she’s never felt before.

Bernie hesitates. “No,” she admits at last. “I think a part of me always knew you were a woman. So I was always too afraid. I trained myself not to think about it.” She takes in a tremulous breath. “After...after Alex, I thought I might be ready. Maybe. But I didn’t need to look, in the end. There you were.”

Serena smiles. “And there _you_ were,” she says softly. “I love you. I tried not to. All my life. But I always have.”

Bernie doesn’t need to return her declaration. It’s written on every shared scar on their flesh. “We’re a pair aren’t we?” she says at last, dropping a kiss onto Serena’s shoulder. 

“Yes, I rather think that’s the idea,” Serena replies, earning herself a mock shove and another kiss, this time bestowed lovingly and reverently to her mouth. And then they get distracted again and there are no more words for a while.

Bernie falls asleep eventually, but Serena has never felt more awake in her life. She thinks of all the years she spent chafing against finding this, convincing herself she didn’t want it, didn’t need it. What if she’d met Bernie then, back when she was so angry? 

And then it comes to her. Bernie had said it - when she was ready, Serena was right there. And wasn’t that true for her too? She hadn’t been ready until that day the scar on her chest appeared and the idea of losing her soulmate before ever finding her had suddenly become real. And when she was finally ready?

There Bernie was.

She supposes everything has worked out exactly as it should, then laughs. Of course it has. That is, as she’d said to Bernie, thinking she was joking, _rather the whole idea._


End file.
